


Sticks and Stones

by 500purplecats (Blaithin)



Category: Girl Meets World
Genre: Gen, If You Squint - Freeform, hints of lucas/maya
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-15
Updated: 2015-09-15
Packaged: 2018-04-20 21:22:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4802660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blaithin/pseuds/500purplecats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU where the things people say about you end up written on your skin</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sticks and Stones

**Sticks and Stones**

****

Twin words curl along the delicate bones of Riley’s shoulder blades.

_Daughter_ is the first word she ever received, thick from repetition, black and time consumingly elaborate.  _Friend_  is almost as big; a bold fan of letters which Riley likes to admire when she is getting dressed. Maya runs hers fingers over it with a reverence that makes the word stretch longer, grander than it maybe should be. At fourteen, Riley is vaguely embarrassed by such elaborate displays of love but when she is older, she takes to wearing backless dresses; the words feel like wings across her bare skin.  

When Auggie is born, S _ister_ creeps across Riley’s palm. _Happy_ and  _Kind_ wrap around her wrists like bracelets and  _Pretty_ imprints itself, pink and delicate, onto Riley’s collarbone. Not all the words she accumulates are as nice;  _Naïve_ and  _Airhead_ scratch themselves into the skin behind her ears when Riley is thirteen and for the first time she thinks about not sharing her words with Maya. In the end Riley does show her friend, but she stops wearing her hair up and pretends she doesn’t know the words are there.

Maya has a matching  _Friend,_ the font is the same as Riley’s but it is fainter, more jaggedly drawn as if it had been hard won rather than lovingly gifted. _Beautiful_ stretches bold and conspicuous down Maya’s arm. It appears at the same time Riley gets  _Naive_ and only grows bigger and more elaborate the older Maya gets. It’s a word that girls like Missy sneer at jealously but Riley knows Maya prefers the smaller multi-coloured  _Talented_  which spirals, small and fragile looking around her finger. Every time Maya paints the word changes colour, until there’s a rainbow of letters flashing at her fingertips.

_Poor_ ,  _Broken_ and  _Bad_  fight for space on the skin over Maya’s heart. They’ve been there for as long as Riley can remember and it takes her a while to understand the significance of their placement. When Maya is fourteen her dad rejects her again and  _Unwanted_ , ugly and bloated, claws at her collarbones. It doesn’t make the words disappear when Maya finds out that Shawn has a matching markbut Riley thinks it helps a little.

When they are in middle school they both get words on their feet. Riley grows into her limbs and  _Clumsy_ fades to a faint dream like scar but Maya doesn’t make it an inch past 5 foot 2 and  _Short_ remains. After their argument, Riley worries that Maya might be upset about it; but one day she sees Maya with her feet in Lucas’s lap, smiling, as he runs his fingers over the cramped letters. Riley wonders why no one ever told her that words can change their meanings.

Farkle has fewer words than Riley or Maya but what he does have are big. _Genius_  is printed, thick and block-like across the top of his head; it’s a word they only discovered when Farkle got bumblegum in his hair and had to shave his head.  _Son_ stretches across his sternum and beneath it a soaring  _Ambitious_ which grows like a bird spreading its wings.

_Weird_  is etched, sharp-edged and raw into Farkle’s neck when he is young and for years Farkle wears turtlenecks to hide it – to stop people from looking at it, agreeing with it and making the word bigger, thicker. It hurts him all the more then when Billy Ross calls Farklea Freak and the word carves itself into the remaining space on his throat. Both Lucas and Maya offer to hurt Billy a whole lot when the see but neither of their hearts are in, not after  _Bully_ is seen strung across Billy’s mouth, spidery and ugly.

Riley thinks Farkle might just be the bravest person she knows when he stops wearing his turtlenecks; people stare at the words once they’re exposed but after a while,  _Brave_ joins them and Farkle jokes that it was worth it. As he gets older the words fade but they never completely disappear.

_Handsome_ is the first word Riley sees of Lucas’. It’s the first word anyone sees – it stretches across his cheekbone, impossible to miss. After a while Riley finds the smaller, deliberately printed  _Protective_ in the bend of his elbow and _Athlete_ laddered down his calf and she’s embarrassed that she didn’t notice them sooner. Lucas shows them the faint  _Honest_ written on his tongue and Maya spends a month referring to Lucas as Honest Abe, intent on making the word spill out his mouth.  To Riley’s surprise, Lucas doesn’t try to stop Maya; instead he looks amused, a smile threatening the edges of his mouth when she teases him. Riley doesn’t understand their game at all.

It’s Maya, not Riley, who finds the small, uneven  _Violent_ and  _Angry_ torn into Lucas’s knuckles. Riley doesn’t see the words until the truth about Lucas’ expulsion comes out. She feels like someone stole all the air from the room, hurt that  _Honest_ Lucas could keep something so important from her. It feels even more like a betrayal when she realises Maya knew about Lucas’s words and hadn’t told her. As they argue, Maya taps her finger rhythmically against chest - against  _Poor, Broken, Bad -_ and Riley remembers that the words on your skin aren’t always true.

They recover from the fight and are better for it. Lucas isn’t the prince of Riley’s dreams but he never really was anyway.  By the time they graduate John Quincy Adams  _Violent_ and  _Angry_  are faint white scars that are invisible unless you know they are there.

**Author's Note:**

> I was thinking a lot about girl meets world dismissal of labels and being yourself, especially in the wake of I am Farkle. I thought this was original but after I'd written it I remembered an Attack on Titan Kink meme which had a similar prompt and found that it had been filled. You should definitely check it out, it's much better than mine: Falsehood is never in words by Vype.


End file.
